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HIS EXCEJ.LKNCY 

JOHN DAYiS LONG 




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CITY OF BOSTOX 



In Board of Aldermen, July 17, 1882. 

Resolved, That the thanks of the City Council are 
due, and they are hereby tendered, to His Excellency 
John D. Long, for the patriotic and instructive Oration 
delivered by him, before the ISIunicipal Government and 
the citizens of Boston, on the Fourth of July instant; 
and that he be requested to furnish a copy thereof for 
publication. 

Passed in Common Council. Came up for concurrence. 
Read and concurred. Approved by the Mayor July 18, 
1882. . - 

A true copy. 

Attest : JOHN T. PRIEST, 

Asst. City Cleric. 



ORATION. 



It has seemed to you and your associates, Mr. 
Mayor, not unfitting, that, once in a century, a rep- 
resentative of the whole Commonwealth of Massa- 
chusetts should speak for this, her capital city, on 
Independence day. A hundred years ago, as now, 
their interests, their hopes, their patriotism, were 
one. If Boston seemed then to stand out as the 
proscenium from which the curtain of the drama 
rose, the scene was a rapidly shifting one, and the 
actors came not alone, like Sam Adams and War- 
ren and Hancock and Knox, from Boston. Like 
Lincoln from Hingham, Hawley from ^N'orthamp- 
ton, Prescott from Pepperell, Heath from Koxbury, 
Gridley from Canton, John Adams from Quincy, 
Cobb from Taunton, Thomas from Kingston, Ward 
from Shrewsbury, and many others, they came from 
Massachusetts at large, and so identified the whole 
province and this its chiefest town, as they have 
been identified from that day to this, in the cause 
of liberty and progress. 



b ORATION. 

Mindful, therefore, of the close relations which 
have thus, at all times, bound Massachusetts and 
Boston tog-ether, I thank you for your courtesy in 
inviting me to speak for you to-day, and I am 
here in obedience to your call. I have, as needs 
nuist be Avith a date celebrated now for more than 
a hundred anniversaries, and with its topics re- 
hearsed till every possible variation has been 
exhausted, no new w^ord to utter, no illumination to 
throw upon the picture. But the day is our 
national birthday, and even its familiar stoiy can- 
not be told too often, if it shall wake each year 
the patriotic pulse of a people so free that they 
are almost unconscious of the value of their birth- 
right of freedom, or shall educate their children 
to admire and emulate the high spirit, the devotion 
to liberty, and the love of country, which inspired 
the fathers and founders of the rejDublic. 

Let us, then, go back to -1776, and recall the scene 
and event which we now commemorate, never for- 
getting that they were only links in the chain which, 
under Providence, had been forming for centuries, 
and forming, let us also, in justice, remembeV, under 
English law, and under the inspiration of English 
hearts. The separation of the colonies from Great 
Britain was the result of no single cause; nor was it 
occasioned solely by reason of a chivalrous devotion 



JULY 4, 1882. 7 

to great i^rinciples of constitutional right or resistance 
to oppression. The vast territoiy of India, stretching 
over half a continent and sunk in the effeminacy 
and ignorance of centuries of stagnation, might for 
years, and may to-day, submit to the rapacious sway 
of the British isles, — to the terror of a suj^erior race 
enriching themselves at its expense. But it was 
not written in the book of human destiny that the 
Christian civilization of the l^ew World, the intel- 
lectual culture of N^ew England, the growing material 
importance of ISTew York and Pennsylvania, the high 
spirit of Virginia and the Carolinas, — nay, that any 
of our colonies, proud of their lineage, devoted to an 
independent faith, founding among themselves insti- 
tutions of learning, expanding apace with the very 
grandeur and extent of the new continent, and year 
by year conscious more and more of their rapid growth 
and coming domain and achievement, — should 
hang as a dependence on an island in the Atlantic, 
more than that the apple, ripe and round, should 
cling to the stem and shrivel there in premature 
decay. In such a condition were the very essentials 
to cultivate the spirit of progress, of independent 
citizenship, and of the right of intelligent men, 
chafing under the stupid narrowness of the dolt who 
happened at that time to encumber the British throne, 
to frame their own laws and govern themselves. 



8 O RATION. 

The divine right of kings was not a doctrine that 
could thrive in such soil ; and no sooner did the 
colonies begin, as a result of simple growth, to feel 
their power and to touch shoulder with one another 
in the sympathy of their geographical and political 
affinities, than independence became inevitable, and 
only sought occasion and apology for its own asser- 
tion. 

To this end had the instruction of the mother 
country herself led. From her own pulpits, in the 
songs of her own poets, in the words of her own 
orators, in the progress of her own statesmanship, 
had for centuries been flowing influences that 
were lifting the individual uian, levelling the acci- 
dental potentate, and proclaiming the unimportance 
of those who govern, and the overwhelming conse- 
quence and needs of tlie governed, even to the 
humblest citizen. It was a matter of indifl'erence 
whether Burke and Chatham in England, and 
Adams and Otis and the town-meetings of Massa- 
chusetts Ba}' in America, lifted tiieir voices in a 
British parliament or in Faneuil Hall or Pembroke 
town-house. The words they spoke, the sentiments 
they uttered, were eternal truth, and had no local 
habitation or name. Under these circumstances, 
allegiance to Great Britain was nothing but a habit 
and a sentiment. The moment li came face to face 



JULY 4, 1882. 9 

in conflict with a right, it went to pieces like a 
bubble; the moment it involved the sacrifice of a 
principle, the cost of injustice to the smallest penny, 
it was gone forever. I take it, there was nothing 
in British oppression that bore with special hardship 
on America. It is not likely that any malicious 
intent existed on the part of king or ministry to 
wrong and tyrannize over us; and both were no 
doubt honest in their conviction that we ' were a 
stift-necked generation, turning in ingratitude on 
the parentage that had borne and nursed us. 
The burdens at which we actually rebelled were 
slight in comparison with those which we had 
previously borne for years, especially during the 
wars with France. In comparison with those which, 
in our recent civil war, we inflicted on ourselves, 
they were next to nothing. It would be hard to 
point to the man or community that, prior to the 
outbreak of bad blood, suff'ered greatly, in person 
or property, from British tyranny. Even the 
Declaration of Independence, which we commem- 
orate to-day, if you carefully peruse it, lacks 
something of that record of specific grievances and 
acts of oppression, which we should expect in a 
statement made in justification of rebellion and 
treason. It would not be difficult to recite wrongs 
which other peoples have borne and still bear, 



10 ORATION. 

tenfold greater than tho^e from which we wrested 
independence. We wdio, in recent years, to suppress 
rebelUon, wilHngly endured excessive governmental 
interference with personal rights, and who saw 
multitudes of new offices created, and sw^arms of 
officials and standing armies in our midst, can hardly 
refrain from smiling at the complaints so grandil- 
oquently put in 1776. ^or must it be overlooked 
that most of these complaints w^ere directed against 
the very measures which w^ere resorted to to over- 
come what Great Britain regarded as treason, and 
which never would have been resorted to at all had 
our fathers been submissive. I do not mean that 
there were no grievances. Grievances there were, 
such as taxation without representation, though 
the actual taxes imposed were slight, and in any 
accustomed form the burden of them would have 
raised no murmur; such also* as the general control 
and management of provincial affiiirs by an agency 
remote and indifferent. But these w ere grievances, 
not so much invented and asserted by the mother 
country as inherent in the very organization of 
her colonial system. It was the instinctive revul- 
sion which an intelligent and not inferior people 
felt for the natural unffiness and injustice of the 
British colonial system as applied to a vigorous 
and self-conscious community, which made any 



JULY4,1882. 11 

restraint intolerable, and independence a necessity. 
To my mind it is infinitely more creditable to our 
fathers that freedom was in this way the result, not 
of resentment, but of a high mtellectual self-respect, 
and of the conviction that in the maturity of their 
growth the time had come for them to take their 
own destiny into their own hands. 

Once maugurated the struggle leaped forthwith to 
the bitterness and desperation of the death-hug. If 
the provocation was lacking before, it was lacking no 
longer. Fatally ignorant of the pride, the English 
thoroughness and tenacity of her own children, Great 
Britain adopted measures of coercion to which they 
could not and would not submit. And when there 
came the Port Bill and the Enforcing Act and the 
Stamp Act, which were intended to humiliate 15oston 
and deprive the people of their familiar privileges 
and place them at the mercy of a ministerial board 
sitting around a table in London city, the fatal step 
was taken; the error could never be retrieved; 
estrangement was only widening with each forcible 
effort to heal it, and the birth of the new republic 
was assured. The rebellion of 1861 failed, not 
because of a lack of brave men and devoted effort, 
but because it was unfit and out of joint with the 
moral and physical order of the times. Unlike the 
American Revolution, it was a movement not with 



12 OKATION. 

but against the lead of civilization; and outside of 
its original limits never struck the spark of sym- 
pathy. In 1776, however, the common heart of the 
whole line of colonies responded to the peril of that 
one which was first to suffer. In the fall of 1774 
met at Philadelphia the original Continental Con- 
gress, more with a view to adjustment than to inde- 
pendence. Its professions of loyalty were sincere, 
and its appeals were not to arms but to the sense of 
justice in the mother countiy. But the tide was 
stronger than those who rode it. The time for the 
friendly arbitrament of counsel and delay was gone ; 
and when the immortal Second Congress met in 
Philadelphia, in May, 1775, Patrick Henry had 
alread}' thundered in the Virginia Convention that 
there was no peace, that the war had actually begun, 
and as for him give him liberty or give him death. 
Lexington green had been crimsoned with the blood 
of the embattled farmers, and Concord Bridge was 
already the beginning of our victories, and hence- 
forth the romance of our annals. 'No Congress 
could make history so fast as it was already making 
at Bunker Hill, in Gloucester Harbor, along the 
shores of Quincy and Marshfield, at the entrench- 
ments around Boston, and in the spontaneous out- 
burst of a common enthusiasm, which brought to the 
cam]:) under Washington, from Carolina, from Vir- 



JULY 4, 1882. 13 

ginia, from Pennsylvania, from Maryland, marching 
over the mountains, and eager for the fray, the sons 
of sister colonies, the riflemen of Daniel Morgan, 
the Puritan and cavalier, the woodsmen and farmers, 
the children of the Huguenots and the Presbyterians. 
Carrying out the instruction of his constituents, 
Richard Henry Lee^ of Virginia, the author of the 
resolution for independence, introduced it into Con- 
gress on the 7th of June, 1776. It met with the 
enthusiastic support of John Adams, who seconded 
it with a fervor and power that gained him the appel- 
lation of the Colossus. It was favored by the subtle 
and philosophic Franklin, who not only compre- 
hended the grandeur of the occasion, but smarted to 
repay, in the achieved independence of his countiy, 
and in the loss to Great Britain of her brightest 
jewels, the insults rankling in his breast, which, 
during his attempt 3X'ars before to plead the cause 
of America before the Privy Council in England, 
had been heaped upon him, amid the sneers of a 
British ministry, by the stinging tongue of Attorney- 
General Wedderburne. It was supported, too, by 
the inflexible will of Sam Adams, and no man 
had from the earliest more clearly foreseen the 
result. On the other side was ranged the cautious 
Dickinson, of Philadelphia, who, till that time the 
most influential member of Congress, now doubted 



14 ORATION. 

whether the hour for separation had come, and, 
doubting, was lost. JSTew Yoi-k, hesitating to risk 
its commei'cial existence, had instructed its dele- 
gates, themselves ripe enoogli for the work, to hold 
back. South Carolina voted against the resolution. 
Pennsylvania and Delaware were divided. But 
these defections were idle. The real resolution of 
independence had long since been uttered. It had 
been the staple of every town-meeting in America, 
the subject of every fireside conversation, the 
thought of every farmer and mechanic; and when 
the fifty men who assembled in that Congress, by 
more than a two-thirds vote, adopted in Committee 
of the Whole, on the first day of July, 1776, the 
resolution of independence, they but gave expres- 
sion to the sentiment of America, as also John 
Adams expressed it in that unpremeditated burst 
of eloquence, of which no report exists except in 
the traditions of its magnificent boldness and vigor, 
and in the imaginary reproduction of Webster. 
On the second day of Jnly even the fears of the 
minority were overcome, and the resolution was 
adopted, without a dissenting vote, that the United 
Colonies were, and of right ought to be, free and 
independent States. Two days later, on the fourth, 
the day we celebrate, the declaration of principles 
on which the resolution of inde]jendence was 



JULY4,1882. 15 

founded, drawn by Thomas Jefferson, then thirty- 
three years of age, and revised by Frankhn and 
Adams, was presented and adopted, and, with the 
broad sign manual of John Hancock at its foot, 
became the great charter of the war, the ])ulletin 
to England and the world of the justice and 
dignity of our cause. 

Kecall the quaint and homely city of Philadel- 
phia; the gloom that hung over it from the 
terrible responsibility of the step there taken; the 
modest hall, still standing and baptized as the 
cradle of liberty. On its tower swung the bell, 
which yet survives, with its legend, "PROCLAIM 
LIBERTY THROUGHOUT ALL THE 
WORLD TO ALL THE mHABITAKTS 
THEREOF." That day it rang out a proclamation 
of liberty that will indeed echo round the world, 
and in the ears of all the inhabitants thereof, long 
after the bell itself shall have crumbled into dust. 
Hancock is in the President's chair; before him sit 
the half hundred delegates, who at that time repre- 
sent America. Among the names it is remarkable 
how many there are that have since been famous in 
our annals, — Harrison, Lee, Adams, Clinton, Chase, 
Stockton, Paine, Hopkins, Wilson, ISTelson, Lewis, 
Walcott, Thompson, Rutledge, and more. The 
committee appointed to draft the declaration are 



16 ORATION. 

Jefferson, youngest and tallest; John Adams; 
Sherman, shoemaker; Franklin, printer; and Robert 
R. Livingston. If the patriot Sam Adams, at the 
sunrise of Lexington, could say, " Oh ! what a 
glorious morning for America!" how well might he 
have renewed, in the more brilliant noontime of 
July 4, 1776, the same 2:)rophetic words! There 
is nothing in the prophecies of old more striking 
and impressive than the words of John Adams, 
who declared the event would be celebrated by 
succeeding generations as a great anniversary festi- 
val and commemorated, as a day of deliverance, from 
one end of the continent to the other; that through 
all the gloom he could see the light; that the end 
was worth all the means; and that posterity would 
triumph in the transaction. 

I am not of those who overrate the past. I 
know that the men of 1776 had the common 
weaknesses and shortcomings of humanity. I 
read the Declaration of Independence with no 
feeling of awe; and yet if I were called upon to 
select from the history of the world any crisis 
grander, loftier, purer, more heroic, I should know 
not where to turn. It seems simple enough to-day. 
There is no school-boy who will not tell you 
he knows it by heart; and so much a part of 
the national fibre is it, that the school-boy 



JULY 4, 1882. 17 

cannot conceive of his or any American's not 
declaring and doing the same thing. Bnt it was 
something else tliat dav. The men who sig'ned 
the declaration knew not bnt they were signing 
warrants for their own ignominious execution on 
the gibbet. It was the desperation of the pun- 
ster's wit that led one of them to say that unless 
they hung together, they would all hang separately. 
The bloody victims of the Jacobite rebellions of 
1715 and 1715 were still a warning to rebels; 
and the gory holocaust of Culloden was fresh in 
the memory. But it Avas not only the personal 
risk; it was I'isking the homes, the connnerce, the 
lives, the property, the honor, the future destiny 
of three million innocent people, — men, women, 
and children. It was defying, on behalf of a 
straggling chain of colonies clinging to the sea- 
board, the most imperial power of the world. It 
was, more than all, like Columbus sailing into 
awful uncertainty of untried space; casting off 
from an established and familiar form of govern- 
ment and politics; drifting away to unknown 
methods, and upon the dangerous and yawning 
chaos of democratic institutions; flying from ills 
they had to those they knew not of; and, per- 
haps, laying the way for a miserable and ])loody 
catastrophe in anarchy and riot. There are times 



18 ORATION. 

when ordinary men are borne ])y the tide of an 
occasion to crests of grandenr in conduct and 
action. Such a time, such an occasion, was that 
which to-day we celebrate. While the signers of 
the Declaration were picked men, none the less 
true is it that their extraordinary fame is due 
not more to their merits than to the crisis at 
which they were at the helm, and to the great 
popular instinct which they obeyed and expressed. 
And so we ask, why do we commemorate with 
such veneration and display this special epoch and 
event in our history; why do we repeat the words 
our fathers spoke or wrote; why cherish their 
names, when our civilization is better than theirs, 
and when we have reached in science, art, educa- 
tion, religion, in politics, in every phase of human 
development, even in morals, a higher level? It 
is because we recognize that in their beginnings 
the eternal elements of truth and right and 
justice were conspicuous, and to those eternal 
verities wq pay our tribute, and not to their sur- 
roundings, except so far as we poetically let the 
form stand for the spirit, the man for the idea, 
the event for the purpose. And it is also because 
we can do no better work than to perjjetuate virtue 
in the citizen by keeping always fresh in the 
popular mind, whether we do it by the art of the 



JULY 4, 18 82. 19 

painter, by oration, or by bonfire, the great heroic 
deeds and times of our history. In this light it 
is ahnost impossible to overrate the influence on 
national destiny of a legend or a name. Look 
back to your own childhood and tell me when you 
first grew mature enough to distinguish patriotism 
from the story of Gen. Warren and Bunker Hill. 
Who shall say trliat the tradition of Marathon and 
Thermopylae did not give us Concord and York- 
town, as it also gave independence to modern 
Greece, and glorified the career and death of Byron, 
and made our own Howe crusader and philan- 
thropist? Who shall determine how far the 
maintenance of the integrity of our Union will 
depend on the memory of Webster, and find help 
in the picture in Faneuil Hall of his great debate 
with Hayne, as well as in his unanswerable logic? 
And who shall say to how great an extent the 
love of country for the next century shall rise 
from the fidelity with which we keep alive in the 
public heart the iiiieinorahilia of our Kevolution and 
of our recent war? Wise, indeed, as well as loyal 
and beautiful, is it that to-day all America joins 
in this observance; that at this hour a thousand 
orators are speaking words of high emprise; that 
poets kindle the fire of patriotism, and that the 
heroes of 1776 stand up from the past, grander 



20 ORATION. 

and diviner for the illnsion of distance, and point 
the way to the highest ideals of national attain- 
ment. The valnable thing in the past is not the 
man or the event, which are Ijotli always ordinary, 
and which, nnder the enchantment of distance and 
the pride of descent, we love to surround with 
exaggerated glory; it is rather in the sentiment 
for which the man and the event stand. The ideal 
is alone substantial and alone survives. 

Let us avoid undue praise of the fathers, because 
the bare truth is tribute enough, and because it is 
so easy to exaggerate the past. Such undue ex- 
altation of the good of other times has its demor- 
alizing side. There is no service or manliness 
in belittling our own times and men. We can 
appreciate the past as well if we appreciate our- 
selves at our own true value. It is the fashion 
of the hour — and not a new fashion, especially 
when partisanship is l)itter and searching — to scat- 
ter the poison of asjDersion on all surrounding 
character, service, and system. And yet, to my 
mind, there is occasion for thorough satisfaction 
with the result of tlie first century of the re- 
public. It began as an experiment, doubtful and 
uncertain; it began with nothing more than a 
feeble union of sentiment, engendered l^y the en- 
thusiasm of connnon militarv service and a common 



JULY 4, 1882. 21 

exposure; it began amid a diversity of interests 
and of races, of religious and ethnic characteris- 
tics; it began not only without money, but with 
a crushing burden of debt, which it seemed to have 
no resources or means of paying; it l)eg«n with 
no hold on the cooperation of foreign powers, ex- 
cept the chivalrous sympathy that ended almost 
with the stirring events of the war that aroused 
it; it began in a state of public demoralization, 
caused by seven years of campaigning, and with 
a currency debased and worthless, and furnishing 
still a terrible warning against the rot which such 
inflation and depreciation cause in the character, 
tone, and truth of a people; it Ijegan with a dis- 
contented and distur1)ed soldiery, unpaid, destitute, 
and neglected, and smarting under the ingratitude 
of their countr}^ Its early years were marked by 
riots and rebellions. It is claimed that nothing 
but the firm and enduring weight of the character 
of Washington held it together. Its constitution 
was framed and adopted only with reluctance and 
doubt. The morals of the people were not of a 
high order. The morals of public men were low. 
Aaron Burr was of a charactei* so notoriously in- 
famous, that to-day it is incredible how he could 
have been chosen Vice-President, and brought 
within two or three votes of the Presidencv itself. 



22 ORATION. 

Hamilton was not free from reproach. Religion, 
when not asleep, was coarse and illiterate. Con- 
gress was the scene of debates bitter and per- 
sonal to a shameful degree. The Cabinet w^as 
divided against itself. The mutual hate of Jef- 
ferson and Hamilton it would ])e hard to parallel. 
Vituperation, abuse, and slander poisoned many an 
honest name; and though now, the mist of 
prejudice having lifted, we look back and see 
only what was solid and valuable growth, yet in 
that day it was said, as we hear it said nowa- 
days, that corruption was undermining the foun- 
dations, and that democracy was a demonstrated 
failure. 

Head the journal of John Quincy Adams, and note 
what half a century ago w^as his estimate of the 
selfishness, meanness, vulgarity, and hopelessness 
of the public service; how speedily he looked 
for the disruption of a brittle republic, and with 
what contempt he refers to Wel)ster and Clay, 
and the names we have been taught to rever- 
ence. A¥e nmst not be ])linded by the miasma 
of present abuse, that is always afloat. We must 
take deeper views and a wider range. Look not 
at any year, but on the whole century, and see 
what has been the advance, what the i>rogress 
in arts, in science, in human life and culture, in 



JULY 4, 188 2. 23 

all that broadens the intellect and enlarges the 
soul, in all that humanizes and educates a peo- 
ple! The feeble colonies are an empire so mag- 
nificent in territory and population that the 
imagination cannot take it in. The imperfect 
league of 1776 is the majestic consolidated nation 
of thirty-eight States, each one an empire, and 
the whole the most magnificent and forward 
cluster of civil polity the world ever saw, — a 
very well-spring of human enlightenment and 
outgrowth in every upward direction. The 
national government, which was almost over- 
thrown, even under the guard of Washington, 
by a whiskey riot in a ravine of the Alle- 
ghanies, has withstood the shock of a civil war, 
that rocked a continent to its foundations, tri- 
umphing not so much by force of arms as by 
the popular sense of right, and rising from the 
convulsion stronger than ever by reason of the 
eradication of the one false and diseased element 
which impaired it, and which was, from the first, 
an element of weakness as it was of wrong. 
Think of what has been done in the matter of 
education, of public schools, of iniiversities of 
learning for both sexes and all races. In science 
we have unlocked the secrets of the earth and 
the air and the sea, and made them not merely 



24: O E A T I O X . 

matters of wonder, but hand-maidens of homely 
use. Religion has been reiined and elevated, and 
the human mind, searching for divine truth, has 
risen above superstition and cant, and, with 
knowledge for its guide, has reconciled faith with 
an enlightened reason. In all matters of comfort, 
of use, of elegance, of convenient living, of house, 
and table, and furniture, and light, and warmth, 
and health, and travel, what thorough and beneficent 
advance equally for all, shaming the petty meanness 
with which, unjust alike to the old times and the 
new, we inveigh against the new times and overrate 
the old! At home it is with a feeling of satis- 
faction and pride that we turn to our own Common- 
wealth in every department of her public life; in 
her spotless judiciary, wdiich has never fallen below 
its best standard, and whose ermine bears no stain; 
or her legislature, which has always expressed 
the popular will, and embodied in its enactments 
the reach of the popular sentiment. Shall I pre- 
fer the old times, when I see government made 
to-day the use, the culture, the salvation of the 
people; saving those who are in peril from want 
and fire and famine; looking after the little chil- 
dren; caring for the insane, the idiotic, the crim- 
inal, the drunkard, the unfortunate, the orphans, 
and the aged; guarding the interests of the 



JULY 4, 1882. 25 

laborer; l^ringiiig to the help of the agriculturist 
the best results of science, and building colleges 
for the promotion of the noble calling of the 
culture of the soil; guarding the savings of the 
small earners; investigating the causes of disease, 
and securing its prevention; giving to all the 
people comforts that were once not even the 
luxurious dreams of princes; pouring out education 
like streams of living water; maintaining great 
and generous charities, and extending the shield 
of its foresight and encouragement over all alike? 
Grant that since the rebellion of 1861, as years 
ago after the revolution of 1776, a period of war 
was followed by an extraordinary period of de- 
moralization, resulting from the excessive and ab- 
normal disturbance of the ordinary channels of 
labor and industry, and especially from that in- 
flation of our currency which gave rise to in- 
credible increase of expenditure and debt, and 
from which recovery came only with a shock. 
Grant that corruption sometimes exists in high 
places and in low; grant that politics are too 
often turned into barter. Whatever the evil, it can- 
not stand against the discernment which is so swift 
to uncover and shame it, and which will permit 
it no concealment. And there is good token in 
the very sensitiveness of the public mind, which 



26 ORATION. 

was never keener or quicker to discover and 
punish fraud and faithlessness than now. It must 
not be forgotten that the repubhc not only 
was an experiment in its inception, but is so 
still. We are apt to judge by the severe rules 
of criticism which we apply to completed work. 
We forget that only a few short years ago it 
was said that a popular government cannot suc- 
ceed; that the popular mind is not sufficiently 
educated to be relied on; that a pure democracy 
has in it no stability or permanence, but must 
go down with the first tumult of popular frenzy; 
that patriotism will decay without the veneration 
that attaches to monarchy; and that in a gov- 
ernment of the people, ignorance, fraud, brutality, 
and crime will rise by might of fist and lung to 
the supremacy. The wonder is, not that the re- 
public is not perfect to-day in its machinery, its 
character, its results, but that, with its monstrous 
expansion from within and innnigration from 
abroad, it has fared so well, and that its achieve- 
ments are better than its founders dared predict 
or hope. Tell me what government, ancient or 
modern, has been more stable, or freer from con- 
vulsion. Who are our politicians, if not our 
presidents of colleges, our brightest poets, our most 
vigorous divines, our conspicuous merchants, our 



JULY 4. 188 2. 27 

foremost lawyers, our leading men ever^^where ? 
Our politics, at which we rail so much, are what we 
are. Do you say that there are peculiar evidences 
of neglect when no pulpit is without its fervid 
appeal for loftier patriotism; when no class grad- 
uates from college that half its orations are not on 
the duty of the citizen to the state; when our cen- 
tennials fairly weary us with the demand, made by all 
who speak by voice or pen, for national purity and 
virtue ; and when no political party dares the popular 
verdict that does not proclaim and exhibit its pur- 
pose of reform in every branch of the public service ? 
Let the test of our hope or despair be not so much 
the severe standard of the very highest reach of the 
demands of to-day, but rather the modest trust with 
which a hundred years ago our fathers risked a 
democracy. Is it nothing* that their perilous 
confidence in human nature, and in the ability 
and inclination of the masses to govern them- 
selves aright, has been justified and not abused? 
Is it nothing that, ruled by a mol), our leaders 
selected from and by a mob, our laws the 
popular sentiment of a mob, yet such is the 
preponderance of the good elements over the 
bad, of the upward tendency over the downward, of 
order over disorder, of progress over stagnation, 
that the experiment has resulted in a century of 



28 ORATION. 

success ; that, however imperfect the scheme in some 
of its outward manifestations, it is correct in ])rin- 
ciple; and that it has demonstrated the practica- 
bihty and wisdom of a government of the people, 
by the people, for the people? If there were none 
in the ranks except the men who have proved un- 
worthy, we might despair; but not when we re- 
member that in every section of the country we still 
number great hosts of honest and able men fit for 
every political need or duty. If a period of national 
demoralization were followed by continued indiffer- 
ence and acquiescence, we might despair, but 
not when we see it followed by the indignant 
uprising of the better elements, the wholesome 
criticism of the press, the outcry of the poet and 
the philosopher, the sturdy and resolute reaction 
of that fundamental intelligence and honesty of 
the people, which are the fruit of our system of 
free education, and which can always l)e relied 
on in the last resort to do the work of reform 
Avhen the crisis comes. Foi' one I feel no 
anxiety. I regard it as a sign of the perma- 
nence of our institutions, that to-day when so 
many mourn over the sadder revelations of the 
time, a wiser philosophy looks through the fer- 
ment that is sloughing the scum from the sur- 
face and purifying the body politic from top to 



JULY 4, 18 8 2. 29 

bottom. To be conscious of the malad}^ in a 
republic of free schools and a free press, is to 
cure it. 

It is easy to raise spectres of danger, and forecast 
perils that threaten to destroy the republic. But it 
will meet and beat them. It is flying in the face of 
nature and of experience to fear that man, with in- 
creasing expansion of his opportunities and powers, 
has, like a child, no horizon of promise beyond his 
present vision. Why should we at the approach of 
the next century, with its magnificent impulse on- 
ward, shudder with the same ignorant and ungodly 
distrust with which the old time trembled at the 
coming of our own? We have brought no dangers 
that we have not averted, no perils that have over- 
whelmed us. Why whisper under the breath that in 
the near years to come men are to withdraw more and 
more from the grinding of unremitted and unlight- 
ened physical toil? Do not you and I enjoy what- 
ever exemption from it there comes to us ; and shall 
not the humblest enjoy as much? Will it be an evil 
when science, with its inventions and its use of the 
illimitable agencies of nature, the development of 
which is now but in its infancy, performs still 
more the drudgery of toil and lets the souls of 
all go freer? Labor and industry, in the nature 
of things, will never cease; but the progress of 



30 ORATION. 

the ages will direct them to higher levels of em- 
ployment, never dispensing with their need, but 
rather adding to their dignity and to the happi- 
ness they return. Why, too, this terror lest 
those, who have not had the sweetness and re- 
finements and elevation of leisure, shall have them 
more and more as well as those to whom it cer- 
tainly has brought, not harm, but culture? Has 
the result hitherto been so disastrous as to make 
us fear either the bettered conditions of the 
masses, or their ambition for Ijetter conditions 
still V Faith in the common people is not a fine 
phrase or a dream; it is the teaching of experi- 
ence and test. They, too, may be confided in to 
measure and accept the necessities and inequali- 
ties that attach to human living*, and they are 
not going to destroy any social economy which 
blesses them all, because it does not bless them 
all alike. Are not fidelity, patience, loyal service, 
and good citizenship, true of the kitchen, the 
loom, and the bench? Is there no professor's 
chair, no clergyman's desk, no merchant prince's 
counting-room, dishonored? Does, indeed, the 
line of simple worth or social or political stability 
run on the border of any class or station? The 
peo])le may be trusted with their own interests. 
If it shall appear that any one form of govern- 



JULY 4, 1882. 31 

ment or society fails, tliere will always be intel- 
ligence and wit enough to foshion a better. 
Forces will come at command. The instinct of self- 
preservation counts for something, as well as the 
elements of goodness and progress which are 
inherent in human nature. And when all these 
unite, while there will indeed be change and revo- 
lution, there wdll never be wreck and chaos. 
There will be fools, and fanatics, and assassins, 
and demagogues, and nihilists, and all sorts of 
insane or vicious dissolvers of security ; there will 
be convulsions and horrors : every fair summer the 
lightning flashes and strikes. But all these are 
the tempests of the year against the unfailing 
simshine and rain which make the blooming and 
fragrant gai'den of the earth. There must, indeed, 
be eternal vigilance and increasing zeal and 
endeavor for the right. But can there be nobler 
or finer service than to contribute these? Or, if 
you, sleek and well-to-do and jealous of your 
fortunate share of good things, fear lest frenzy 
and drunkenness and vice invade your domain, 
will you not stop sneering at the reformers, who, 
in whatever line or of whatever sex or social scale, 
are trying to breast the torrent, and give them 
your countenance, your help, and your right arm ? 
Shall our forecast of imminent or coming perils 



82 ORATION. 

unnerve us and awake only a whine of despair; 
or shall it rather put us to our mettle, and to the 
development of the better influences which always 
have averted and always will avert disaster ? 

Grant the great accumulations of individual and 
corporate wealth, with its larger luxuries; grant this, 
and, if there be danger in it, — as' there is, — be 
on your guard. But is it all evil? Have the multi- 
tude been correspondingly straitened and deprived? 
Are the homes, the food, the clothing, the literary 
and aesthetic tastes, and the amusements of the 
toilers, more limited, or do they share in the general 
betterment? Is the pul^lic library closed to them? 
Is there no newspaper, — a library in itself, — in their 
hands each day? Have they less or dimmer light 
to read by than before; or scantier means of 
conveyance from the city to the fields and beach; 
or more meagre communication with the great orbit 
of the living world, its interests, its activities, its 
I'esources? May we not yet find even in this bug- 
bear f)f excessive wealth, with its perilous luxury 
emasculating those who enjoy it and tempting those 
who ape it, the seeds of the evil's own cure? If 
it be not so, it is the first instance of a corru])tion 
which has not wrought its own better life. Xeed 
we, indeed even now, look far off for a day when 
the vulgar ghittony of wealth Avill be the disdain 



JULY 4, 188 2. 33 

of good manners and high character, not worth its 
own heavy weight, and no longer the aim of a 
better and finer time? Is happiness, or was it 
ever, correspondent with wealth or Inxmy? Are 
not most men superior to either, or to the fever 
for them? I do not think it too much to say, 
that in the time to come, " Give me neither povert}^ 
nor riches " will be not only the wise man's prayer, 
but the " smart " man's maxim and the aristocrat's 
choice. What refreshment, even to-day, to turn 
to examples of wealth, — of which so many are 
illustrious in your own city, — which finds its 
most gracious use and its most indulgent luxury 
in cooling streams of charity and beneficence 
flowing broadcast amid the parched lowlands of 
want and ignorance and wrong! Under our 
system the easy mobility of wealth is its own no 
small safeguard and regulator, l^ot only do for- 
tunes come and go; not only from all rounds of 
the social ladder do the millionnaires spring; but, 
even while retained in the same hand, wealth does 
not lie inactive and embayed, but is coursing every- 
where, a trust rather than an exclusive possession 
to its owner, employing, supporting, enriching a 
thousand other men. To assail it is to attack not 
him, but them. It i's engaged in their service more 
than in his. It has no existence except in this 



34 ORATION. 

very subservience to the general use. Destroy this 
function, and it is but a corpse, worth no man's 
having. Fortunate is the community, and men do 
not deca}^, where, under our institutions, wealth 
accumulates. It cannot fill one hand without 
overflowing into every other. It cannot live to 
itself alone. 

Danger and peril enough indeed; need every- 
where for safeguards and forethought! But the 
world is a failure and man is a lie if there be not 
in him the capacity to rise to his own might, and 
to keep pace with his own growth. Are education, 
science, is this godlike mind, are the soul and the 
moral nature, to count for nothing but their own 
disaster? Is there no future manhood to meet the 
future crisis? Is there no God? As the dead past 
buries its dead, so the unborn future will solve its 
own needs. Ours it is to do the duty of the present 
hour. 

And to that high duty with what a trumpet-call 
are we summoned ! I would at once avoid indiscrim- 
inate praise or blame of the things of to-day. I 
would not so assail our national and social and polit- 
ical character and men and institutions as to destroy 
our self-respect; nor, on the other hand, would I 
shut my eyes to the glaring defects that exist, and 
that are a reproach to any people. There is rust 



JULY 4, 18 82. 35 

upon our escutcheon. Our civil service cries aloud 
for the reform which has begun to come, and which 
is already shaping the action of politicians and de- 
partments that are unconsciously obeying the public 
sentiment it has created. There is sometimes lack 
of homely honesty in our touch upon the public 
money; there is dishonor in high places; there are 
frauds in finance. But these are evils not permanent 
in the heart of a progressive j)eople. They are only 
incidental to incomplete systems. They suggest what 
would be a nobler and more vital theme for us at 
this time than even the Declaration of Independence 
of 1776; and that is a new and present declaration 
of independence, which, if proclaimed to the world in 
honesty and sincerity, would make some John Adams 
of to-day prophesy that it would be henceforward 
celebrated by succeeding generations from one end 
of the continent to the other. 

The century just past was a century of military and 
political growth; the century opening this hour will 
be one of moral and scientific growth. The parties 
of the future can only succeed if they embody some 
great moral element and purpose. Let us have 
here and now a new declaration of indejjendence, — 
independence from ignorance and prejudice and 
narrowness and false restraint; from the ruthless 
machineiy of war, so that we may have the benefi- 



36 O K A T I N . 

cent influences of peace; from the clumsiness of 
any lingering barbarism, so that we may have the 
full development of a Christian civilization; from the 
crimes that infest and retard society; from intem- 
perance and drunkenness and false gods; from low 
views of public trust. 'No declaration of the fathers 
would compare for a moment with a declaration of 
the high moral purposes that beckon us on to a 
loftier national life. The field is unlimited; the 
opportunity for growth inexhaustible. Only let us 
realize the absolute duty of impressing on the 
leading classes, as we call them, on the educated 
and religious classes, at least, the necessity of their 
projecting themselves out of the ranks which need 
no physician into the ranks which do. I do not 
mean the nonsense of class distinctions; I mean 
that whoever is a foremost man in any sphere, in 
the professions, in trade or elsewhere, whoever leads 
in politics, in church, in society, in the shoj:), must 
feel that on his shoulders alone i-ests the public 
safety. 

There must be the sense of personal obligation 
on every man whose natural power or happy op- 
portunities have given him a lift in anywise above 
the rest. Virtue, public and private, will become 
easy and popular when it is the badge and inspi- 
ration of the leaders ; and good influences from the 



JULY 4, 1882. 37 

top will permeate through the whole body pohtic 
as rain fiUers through the earth and freshens it 
with verdure and beauty and fertihty. I would 
emphasize, more than anything else, the duty of 
the enlightened classes to throw all their energies 
into the popular arena. Why should the ingen- 
uous youth, fresh from college, dream of Pericles 
swaying, with consunnnate address and eloquence, 
the petty democracy of Athens, and himself shun 
the town-house, where, in a golden age, beside 
which the age of Pericles is brass, is moulded the 
destiny of his own magnificent republic? Why 
kindle with the invective of Cicero, or the wit 
of Aristophanes, and himself be too dainty to 
lift voice or finger to banish Catiline and Cleon 
from manipulating the honor, the integrity, the 
achievement of the fotherland, bequeathed to him 
in sacred trust by his own heroic ancestors? .Little 
sympathy is to be felt with the spirit that stands 
aloof and rails at the clumsy work of a government 
by the people, who, on their part, invariably wel- 
come the approach of the man of culture, and will 
give him place if only he will not convey the idea 
that he despises it. It is useless to deny that the 
scholars have failed oftentimes — less of late — to 
improve their opportunity ; and if ever the republic 
o-oes to the bad, it will be, not because the illit- 



38 ORATIOX. 

erate and lax have seized and depraved it, but 
because the instructed and trained have neglected it. 
To me it seems axiomatic that the educated and 
virtuous, in a free State, can control it if they will. 
Here we are at the threshold of these great economic 
questions of labor, of ca^jital, of currency- They 
affect the very tables and hearthstones and muscles 
of us all. AYe have yet to solve the problem of 
so distributing the excess of the grain of the 
woi'ld that no man shall be unable to fairly ex- 
change his product for it; of so distributing the 
excess of wealth that no man shall be destitute 
who is willing to work. There will be fewer 
frauds upon the revenue when connnerce is fur- 
ther relieved from its restraints. Defalcations will 
be rare when the proper channels for capital are 
alone open and the eddies and cataracts of base- 
less speculation are avoided. There will be no 
terrorism of strikes when labor is directed aright 
and its wages are its honest measure. There will be 
no bubbles to burst, no corners for the gamblers 
to work up, when the laws that regulate the 
carrying of the product to the consumer are 
learned, and the supply becomes a steady stream, 
flowing into and satisfying the demand. All 
these are the questions of the economy- of the 
future. There lies before us a field which should 



J U L Y 4 . 1 8 8 2 . 39 

make the heart of a true man glad as he 
sees approachmg a centmy of peace, of wise 
economies, of amelioration for the masses, of op- 
portunity for lifting all men to a happy and useful 
activity. So shall those who follow reap a grander 
harvest than ours. It is God's earth, and He 
made it for His children. How the arts will 
educate and train them; how science will enlio-hten 
them; how great moral strides will take them to 
loftier planes of conduct and life! There can be 
no failure of the republic among an intelligent 
people, with schools for the young, with good 
examples in the past, with Christian ideals for 
the future. It has already surmounted its most 
stupendous risks and assaults. It has ridden them 
all safely over. The late civil war will only 
cement the structure. I am told that on the 
battle-fields of Virginia, so swift is time's erasure, 
where, now seventeen years ago, the land was 
rough with the intrenchments of the camp, already 
new woody growths have covered them over, and 
the foliage and the turf and the fruitful farms 
bear no mark of war, but wave with lines of 
beauty and of harvest. So be it, too, in the 
nation at large! The contest is over: the wrons" 
is righted; the curse is off; the land is redeemed; 
the sweet angels of peace and reconciliation are 



40 ORATION. 

flitting from door to door, sitting at the tents, 
inspiring kinder thonghts and sympathies, and 
awakening at this very hour the ancient memories 
of a common sacrifice and a common glory. The 
great prolific fields of the South, its rivers and 
natural resources, saved from the blight of slavery, 
will he the loom and granary and wealth of ns all. 
The softening influences of a common interest ^will 
draw together the people of all sections. Com- 
merce and trade and learning, and all the affilia- 
tions that interweave the affections of a people, 
will surround and sustain the central pillar of a 
common country and destiny. 

I am now the hundredth in tliat succession 
with whom Boston has charged her Fourth of 
July orations. Our beloved country is more than 
a hundred years old. A century has come and 
has gone. It is indeed but as a day; yet what 
a day! ]S^ot the short and sullen day of the 
winter solstice, but the long, glorious, and prolific 
summer day of June. It rose in the twilight 
glimmerings of the dawn of Lexington, and its 
rays falling on the mingled dew and gore of 
that greensward, and a little later across the 
rebel gun-barrels of Bunker Hill, and then 
tenderly lingering on the dead upturned face of 
Warren, l)roke in the full splendor of the first 



JULY 4, 188 2. 41 

Fourth of July and lay warm upon the bell m 
the tower of Independence Hall, as it rang out 
upon the air the cry of a free nation newly 
born. Its morning sun, now radiant and now 
obscured, shone over the battle-fields of the 
Revolution, over the ice of the Delaware, and 
over the ramparts at Yorktown swept by the 
onslaught of the chivalrous Lafayette. It looked 
down upon the calm figure of Washington in- 
augurating the new government under the Con- 
stitution. It saw the slow but steady consolida- 
tion of the Union. It saw the marvellous stride 
with which, in the early years of the present 
century, the republic grew in wealth and popu- 
lation, sending its ships into every sea, and its 
pioneers into the wilds of the Oregon and to 
the lakes of the JS^orth. It burst through the 
clouds of the war of 1812, and saw the navy 
of the young nation triumph in encounters as 
romantic as those of armed knights in tournament. 
It heard the arguments of Madison, Hamilton, 
Marshal, Story, and Webster, determining the scope 
of the constitution and establishing forever the 
theory of its powers and restrictions. It beheld 
the overthrow of the delusion that regarded the 
United States as a league and not a nation, and 
that would have sapped it with the poison of 



42 . ORATION. 

nullification and secession. It saw an era of liter- 
ature begin, distinguished by the stately achieve- 
ments of the historian, the thought of the philoso- 
pher, the grace of oratory, the sweet pure verse of 
the American poets — poets of nature and the heart. 
It brought the tender ministry of unconsciousness to 
human pain. It caught the song of machinery, the 
thunder of the locomotive, the first click of the 
telegraph. It saw the measureless West unfold 
its prairies into great activities of life and prod- 
uct and wealth. It saw the virtue and culture 
and thrift of ^ew England flow broad across 
the Mississippi, over the Rocky Mountains and 
down the Pacific slope, expanding into a civiliza- 
tion so magnificent that its power and grandeur 
and influence to-day overshadow indeed the fount 
from which they sprang. It saw America, first 
wrenching liberty for itself from the hand of 
European tyranny, share it free as the air with 
the oppressed and cramped peoples of Europe, 
carrying food to them in their starvation, offer- 
ing them an asylum, welcoming their cooperation 
in the development and enjoyment of the gener- 
ous culture and freedom and opportunity of the 
'New World, and setting them, from the fii'st 
even till now, an example of free institutions 
and local popular government, which every in- 



JULY4,1882. 43 

telligent and self-respecting people must follow. 
Its afternoon was indeed overcast with shame- 
ful assault made on an unoffending neighbor to 
strengthen the hold of slavery upon the mis- 
guided interests of the country; and there came 
the fiery tempest of civil war: the heart of the 
nation mourned the slaughter of its patriots, and 
the treason and folly of its children of the South, 
yet welcomed them back to their place in the family 
circle. And now eventide has come; the storm is 
over; the long day has drawn to its close in the 
magnificent irradiation that betokens a glorious 
morning. We gather at our thresholds and 
hold sweet neighborly converse. Our children are 
about us in pleasant homes; our flocks are safe; 
our fields are ripening with the harvest. We 
recall the day, and pray that the God of the pil- 
grim and the patriot will make the morrow of our 
republic even brighter and better. May it indeed 
be the land of the free, — the land of education and 
virtue, in which there shall be none ignorant or 
depraved, none outside the pale of the influence 
and sympathy of the best, and therefore no swift or 
slow declension to corruption and death, no decline 
or fall for the future historian to write. 



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